VIDALIA — Footballs, textbooks and backpacks aren’t a necessary part of the newest after school club at Vidalia High School.

Instead, the members, or players, prefer small black and white figurines.

And “check” is the desired result.

So far, the Vidalia High School Chess Club has a second place finish at the state tournament under their collective belts.

The event was at De LaSalle High School in New Orleans in April.

The team, composed of juniors Brian Beard, Quentien Garretson and Phillip Moss and senior Joe Passmore, is in its first year.

As individuals, Garretson won the eighth-place trophy, Moss took the ninth-place trophy and Beard and Passmore were awarded gold and silver metals, respectively.

The group had intra-group competitions to determine who would compete at the state level, but the state tournament was their first out-of-club event.

“I’m very proud of them,” club coach Olga Purvis said. “They had some pretty tough competition.”

The club’s origin came about when Beard and Garretson began playing chess after Purvis’ Spainish class one day last year.

Garretson’s stepfather had taught him to play the game, but he never really played before last year, he said.

“It was just a game that we hadn’t played that much,” Beard said.

After interest grew among several other students, the club was officially formed this year. They meet on Tuesday and Thursday during club period, and on some Wednesdays they practice during lunch.

The team does exercises with individual game pieces so that they can really see how the individual pieces act as a part of the whole game, Purvis said.

The team had to join the United States Chess Federation and the Louisiana Chess Association so that they could compete in the tournament.

Though some of the competitors took the tournament very seriously, Beard said that the VHS club really just like to play the game.

“There are some that take the competition pretty seriously,” Garretson said. “There were others that would talk during the games, but once they started losing, they would get more and more agitated.”

Purvis said she hopes Vidalia’s team will spark interest with other area schools so they will not have to travel so far for tournaments.

The club is a good opportunity for more intellectually inclined students to get involved in an extracurricular activity, Purvis said.

“There are already a lot of activities for the athletic types,” she said. “Not that we exclude athletes — we have two football players on our team.”